Chicago Police Department - Essay Example

The Chicago PD’s first strength is the fact that it has something of a monopoly in its field. When a person wants to take recourse to the legal system for a crime, their only recourse is to the Chicago PD, and by law they are the only group that provide many of the services they do. This means that the Chicago PD does not need to fear competition from any other group or organization providing similar services. The Chicago PD’s second major strength is in another vein, recognisability and marketing.

The Police Department is so well known and intrinsically connected to their services in public knowledge that they have no need to spend many resources on marketing simply to let people know they exist and what their services are. Chicago PD’s widespread recognition can, however, be as much of a weakness as it is a strength. While Chicago Police Department is incredibly well known, but as mentioned above its reputation is formed as much by media as anything else, and thus misinformation and messages the Chicago PD do not want to be connected to can be at least as well known as things it wants to be connected to.

One of the best ways for the Chicago PD to minimize this weakness is to work with community groups to spread the message that the Chicago PD wants, and actively fight against misrepresentation in media. The Chicago police department’s second main weakness is the fact that it relies heavily on crime reporting to be able to do its job effectively (). The Chicago PD thus must make itself as accessible as possible in order to find true criminals rather than just those who are afraid of the police.

The Chicago PD can fight this as much as possible by minimizing the degree to which they attack people who are reporting crimes. Though it is responsible for finding criminals equally, allowing people of questionable immigration status or who might be involved in crime themselves to report crime allows them to respond more universally to crime. The Chicago Police Department has a wide array of opportunities to better fulfill its mission statement. One of the biggest ones revolves around the fact that by its very nature members of the police department have to be in constant contact with the members of the community in which they live.

This means that if the Chicago PD can successfully realign itself to focus on community outreach, it can more easily cure the problems of a community rather than just treat the symptoms (Chicago PD 1993). The second major opportunity for the Chicago PD is that technology of policing is constantly advancing, and often at a rate much faster than the forces police are trying to fight (ie. Criminals). This means that if the Police Department successfully identifies trains and begins use of new and emerging technologies it can accomplish its mission with increasing efficiency, as it often does not have to fight competition with access to the same emergent technologies (Sims 2011).

The biggest threats to the Chicago PD is the growing trend of people failing to report crimes and settle things using criminal activity, especially gang violence. This undermines the whole system under which the police force works, and